🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <bga498$mokok$1@ID-192964.news.uni-berlin.de>, 
"Thomas M. Goethe" <goethe11@lycos.com> wrote:
>    I think the deal here is that the rep was educated to deal with
>Americans, understood our culture and had a good command of the language.

This is an aspect of India that struck me when there.  The older 
Indians had learnt their English from the English, and most spoke it 
beautifully.  The younger ones had learnt it from other Indians, and 
had an accent much more difficult to understand.  

I would expect that in another generation or so Indian "English" will 
be totally incomprehensible to Aussies or Yanks.  (Maybe the Poms 
themselves could cope -- many of their dialects are incomprehensible 
too. ;-)

>That has not been the case with most of my calls. This is not to say that
>there aren't a lot of talented Indians, just that one needs more than
>technical knowledge to provide tech support. I would, for example, be unable
>to provide good support for Indians as I am unable to speak their languages
>and do not understand their culture well enough to communicate effectively
>even if I had a crash lesson in Tamil or Hindi.

That's another issue.  I think the official language is still 
English(?). Though there have been pushes to switch to Hindi, that 
change has been strongly resisted by a number of States.  In fact, it 
surprises me that the place hangs together at all, considering the 
cultural diversity.  

I knew there were language differences, for example, but I hadn't 
realised that they also have completely different scripts!  Once we 
crossed the border into one of the southern States, my Hindi-speaking 
colleague was as baffled as I was -- he couldn't even read the street 
signs, much less speak the lingo.  English was the only common 
language -- which almost put me into the position of "interpreter" in 
several situations of misunderstandings!

 

Cheers, Phred.

-- 
ppnerkDELETE@THISyahoo.com.INVALID